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Shock wave

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Shock wave

In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a medium, but is characterized by an abrupt, nearly discontinuous, change in pressure, temperature, and density of the medium.

For the purpose of comparison, in supersonic flows, additional increased expansion may be achieved through an expansion fan, also known as a Prandtl–Meyer expansion fan. The accompanying expansion wave may approach and eventually collide and recombine with the shock wave, creating a process of destructive interference. The sonic boom associated with the passage of a supersonic aircraft is a type of sound wave produced by constructive interference.

Unlike solitons (another kind of nonlinear wave), the energy and speed of a shock wave alone dissipates relatively quickly with distance. When a shock wave passes through matter, energy is preserved but entropy increases. This change in the matter's properties manifests itself as a decrease in the energy which can be extracted as work, and as a drag force on supersonic objects; shock waves are strongly irreversible processes.

Shock waves can be:

Some other terms:

The abruptness of change in the features of the medium, that characterize shock waves, can be viewed as a phase transition: the pressure–time diagram of a supersonic object propagating shows how the transition induced by a shock wave is analogous to a dynamic phase transition.

When an object (or disturbance) moves faster than information can propagate into the surrounding fluid, the fluid near the disturbance cannot react or "get out of the way" before the disturbance arrives. In a shock wave the properties of the fluid (density, pressure, temperature, flow velocity, Mach number) change almost instantaneously. Measurements of the thickness of shock waves in air have resulted in values around 200 nm (about 10−5 in), which is on the same order of magnitude as the mean free path of gas molecules. In reference to the continuum, this implies the shock wave can be treated as either a line or a plane if the flow field is two-dimensional or three-dimensional, respectively.

Shock waves are formed when a pressure front moves at supersonic speeds and pushes on the surrounding air. At the region where this occurs, sound waves travelling against the flow reach a point where they cannot travel any further upstream and the pressure progressively builds in that region; a high-pressure shock wave rapidly forms.

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